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Programming Archive

Thursday, December 10, 2009 - 11:18am

Tonight on Inquiry talk with MARC COLLIN, co-leader of the French band/collective NOUVELLE VAGUE. Over three CDs, Nouvelle Vague has taken cherished alternative punk and New Wave songs of the late 1970s and 1980s and re-interpreted them as bossa nova, country western and ballad tunes. The results are disorientating and delightful. On their latest release “3”, Nouvelle Vague also performs a series of duets with some of the original artists. Ian McCulloch of Echo and the Bunnymen sings on Nouvelle Vague’s updated version of “Colors” and Terry Hall of the Fun Boy Three and the Specials sings on “Our Lips Are Sealed.” Also featured is an acoustic folk interpretation of “God Save the Queen” by the Sex Pistols. For a video of Nouvelle Vague performing “Ca Plane Pour Moi” originally sung by Plastic Bertrand, go to:

http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&VideoID=100...

 Bonus: we also discuss why you should never trust what is written on Wikipedia.

Tuesday, December 8, 2009 - 2:50pm

This was the lead of the story in the Worcester Telegram & Gazette on January 6, 2009: 
The Worcester Center for Crafts, one of the city’s oldest cultural institutions, has suspended daily operations and may have to close permanently if it cannot raise $1 million by the end of the month.

And this was the headline of the story in the Worcester Telegram & Gazette more than 11 months later on November 25, 2009:

Craft Center comeback: With help from WSC, staff and volunteers, Festival of Crafts returns for 40th year. 

The main savior, according to this T&G story, was Worcester State College, which entered into an alliance with the 154-year-old Craft Center last June.

The agreement included $250,000 a year to rent studio space for college students at the center and a large loan to clear the center's crippling debt.

But the saving graces of a century and a half of community goodwill and a dedicated cadre of staff, students and volunteers can't be discounted.

More than a hundred volunteers have stepped forward to help the Craft Center pull off the festival on the weekend of November 28 and 29.

My guest, Carol Donnelly, is interim director of the Worcester Center for Crafts.

Friday, December 4, 2009 - 10:45am

Erin Williams of the Worcester Cultural Coalition & Troy Siebels of the Hanover Theatre for the Performing Arts talk about the Woo Card: Opening the door to Worcester County's cultural community.

Begun in 2007 in partnership with the Colleges of Worcester Consortium, the WOO Card program has distributed some 12,000 cards exclusively to Worcester area college students as means of providing students with discounted access to area cultural venues.

In November 2009, Public WOO Cards became available for purchase by the general public for just $20.
In addition to offering well over $250 in savings, WOO Card users will also earn points each time they use their card making them eligible for monthly drawings for fantastic prizes.
Nearly 20 area cultural venues are participating in the WOO Card program, including: American Antiquarian Society, ARTSWorcester, Broad Meadow Brook Wildlife Sanctuary, EcoTarium, Fruitlands Museum, Hanover Theatre for the Performing Arts, Higgins Armory Museum, Mechanics Hall, Music Worcester, Museum of Russian Icons, stART on the Street, Tower Hill Botanic Garden, Traina Center for the Arts, Worcester Art Museum, Worcester Chamber Music Society, Worcester Hibernian Cultural Centre and the Worcester Historical Museum.

Thursday, December 3, 2009 - 12:07pm

Inquiry welcomes back artist and teacher ROSEMARY LeBEAU. Rose’s work includes unique hand painted transferred photography, glass etching, book making and large complexly beautiful assemblages of found objects. After decades of creating work, in 2009 she had her first retrospective at her house, and that exhibition garnered many critical raves. Tune in and listen to one of the most unique artists in New England talk about her amazingly varied work.

Thursday, December 3, 2009 - 11:45am

Babysitting is really a 20th Century phenomena, that only took off in the Depression. But society’s ideas about the babysitters were often at odds with the reality, and these differences reflect a cultural battlefield that existed over the development of a teen girl culture. Did you know that for decades babysitters have tried to organize? Or that many teen girls have always been very ambivalent about babysitting? Why have babysitters been shown to be the victims of so many slasher films? Why are there so many apocryphal stories about bad babysitters? What do the answers to these questions say about how our society looks at teenage girls? Tune in to Inquiry tonight when we speak with MIRIAM FORMAN-BRUNELL about her complex and fascinating book BABYSITTER: AN AMERICAN HISTORY. Professor Forman-Brunell is also the co-director of the educational website resource CHILDREN AND YOUTH IN HISTORY, which can be found at: http://chnm.gmu.edu/cyh/

Monday, November 30, 2009 - 10:26am

Kathryn Walt Hall is the proprietor of HALL Wines in Napa Valley and
has been involved in the California wine industry since her family
first purchased a vineyard thirty years ago. She has had a
distinguished career as a successful businesswoman, community activist,
and most recently as the United States Ambassador to Austria. Kathryn
is passionate about her career in the wine industry and talks about the
impact women have had on this industry.

www.hallwines.com

Wednesday, November 25, 2009 - 11:09am

Imagine Dante’s classic L’Inferno, told entirely through Bazooka Joe Bubble Gum comics complete with cheesy prizes and gum wrappers.  Or perhaps you would like to see Charlie Brown as Gregor Samsa and Little Lulu as Hester Prynne. Or maybe Beavis and Butthead in a production of “Waiting for Godot”. Welcome to the wild world of MASTERPIECE COMICS: WHERE CLASSICS AND COMICS COLLIDE.  Tonight, Inquiry welcomes artist, teacher and cartoonist R. SIKORYAK, who has created a unique literary art form, a surprising smash up between great literature and classic comics, many now compiled for the first time in one large insanely wonderful volume..

Wednesday, November 25, 2009 - 10:24am

One of the most unique and exciting graphic novels created in some time centers around the unlikely subject of Bertrand Russell’s search for mathematical proof based on logic and his decades long struggle to write the Principia Mathematica. This almost unreadable series of highly technical logic books takes 362 pages just to prove that 1+1=2.  And ultimately this life’s work was shown to be a pointless and impossible endeavor! CHRISTOS PAPADIMITRIOU, writer and C. Lester Hogan Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley teamed up with APOSTOLOS DOXIADIS, a writer who has done award-winning work in film and theatre. Together with artists ALECOS PAPADATOS and ANNIE DI DONNA, they have created a stunning graphic history of 20th Century logic, mathematics and philosophy that manages to be compelling, thrilling and beautiful. LOGICOMIX: AN EPIC SEARCH FOR TRUTH weaves the passionate conversations of Christos and Apostolos with the life stories Russell, Alfred North Whitehead, Ludwig Wittgenstein and many others and along the way, the ancient Greek play, The Oresteia, is even retold! Against all odds, it all hangs together wonderfully and the result is truly unique and moving work of writing and art.

Wednesday, November 25, 2009 - 9:41am

Inquiry continues its series of conversations with people who work at FERMILAB.  Fermilab is a leading research facility for high-energy physics as well as the United States largest proton accelerator. Tonight, we talk with MARGE BARDEEN, MANAGER OF THE FERMILAB EDUCATION OFFICE, because Fermilab is also a leader in science-education for grades K-12. For decades now,  Fermilab has reached out to students and educators around the world, offering tours, summer programs, numerous educational materials and many opportunities learn how to bring hard science back into the classroom. Tune in and learn about the Lederman Science Center, Quarknet, the Fermilab teacher resource center and their Summer Institute for Science Teachers. Fermilab has even developed a way to bring something of high energy accelerator physics right into your classroom by developing a muon detector kit. If you are a science teacher, student interested in physics or a parent don’t miss tonight’s show. The Fermilab Education Resources website can be found at: http://ed.fnal.gov/

Wednesday, November 25, 2009 - 9:19am

When we put a picture on Facebook, buy something on Amazon or search for something using Google, that very personal information remains available to prying eyes in perpetuity. The Internet never forgets anything. Inquiry’s guest tonight believes that is a very unnatural and dangerous development. VIKTOR MAYER-SCHÖNBERGER, currently the director of the Information and Innovation Policy Centre at the National University of Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy. His latest book DELETE: THE VIRTUE OF FORGETTING IN THE DIGITAL AGE describes how the digital age is denying us the human act of forgetting. What will happen to society when everything we post is recorded and available on-line throughout our lives? Is there something we can do to change this Orwellian state of affairs? Tune in to Inquiry and find out.

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